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To: pickrell
There was no clause in the U.S. Constitution dedicated to the Separation of Media and State.
I agree that that is not stated explicitly in the Constitution, but it is not necessary to underestimate the framers of the Constitution/Bill of Rights. The reality we see is that the correct grammar is that “journalism is” not “journalists are.” Journalism is politically monochromatic. The first question is, “Why?” It took a shocking length of time after I realized the “bias in the media” for it to dawn on me that the reason journalism is monochromatic is that journalists all face the same incentives, and journalists all talk to each other incessantly. They do that inherently, of course, in that journalists talk to everyone incessantly. They also belong to the National Press Club, and no doubt other associations. And we have the word of Adam Smith as to the results to be expected:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
You can say all you want about the National Press Club, or the White House Press Club, or any other voluntary association of that ilk. But there is a journalism institution which, hiding in plain sight, has every inch of the influence necessary to explain why journalism is and must be homogeneous. That institution is the wire service.

There is more than one wire service, but even if there were a hundred of them, they would IMHO all promote the same politics, simply because they all face the same incentives. And, of course, in fact a single wire service - the Associated Press - overwhelmingly predominates, precisely because of its history of monopolistic behavior. What is the incentive which faces journalism in general, which drives journalists to be “liberals?” It is the fact that they do nothing but talk, and therefore their incentive is to promote talk above action.

A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt famously asserted that

"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . . 
That sentiment was liberalism 100 years ago. But it obviously is not congenial to someone who talks all the time, and does nothing. So in the 1920s, journalism took the popular and honorable label “liberal,” and inverted its meaning to apply it to people with the exact opposite predilection to that of “It is not the critic who counts.”

And what is the exact opposite of “It is not the critic who counts?” It is the cynical rejection of the primacy of action over talk. Ownership is credit for valuable action, and the opposite of granting the "doer of deeds” credit for the value he added to society is familiar - “If you own a business, you didn’t build that.

OK, that is my definition of the problem - what constitutional recourse could theoretically be had? IMHO there is a case. First, let us analyze the rationale of current regulation. There is IMHO no case that opinion transmission technology should be regulated. You can easily say that “the Framers didn’t envision television,” but in fact they did envision - and they did support - "the progress of science and useful arts” by authorizing Congress to institute the Patent Office. They also allowed for progress in the Constitution itself - Article V, “Amendments.” The existence of those two provisions implies that if technological changes to the propagation of opinion by technical means come to require regulation, they can be regulated in a constitutional manner - by amending the Constitution. Absent a constitutional amendment, the First Amendment forbids the government from regulating “the press” in any technological incarnation.

That is obviously an argument against the FCC, at least in any form which is remotely susceptible to promoting or subverting particular politicians or parties. But it is also, and especially, an argument against “campaign finance reform” in all its forms. Here, I resort to the aspect of the First Amendment which forbids an establishment of religion - that is, it forbids the government from recognizing priestly secular authority - as well as the prohibition in the Constitution of “titles of nobility,” to argue for equality of all, including journalists, before the law. “Campaign Finance Reform” presumes to establish a so-called “Fourth Estate” - journalists - as de facto a priestly class who are officially recognized as being "objective.” The reality of efforts at objectivity is precisely the opposite of the Star Wars dictum of “Do or not do, there is no ‘try.’” WRT objectivity, you can try to be objective - you can even assert that you are trying to be objective - but you cannot claim actually to be objective without proving that you are not objective about yourself. Or anything else.

And the reality is that if a case were brought to SCOTUS which gave it the opportunity overturn McConnell v. FEC - and thus of McCain-Feingold - a favorable decision would only depend on Robert and Alito agreeing with the dissent in McConnell. The majority opinions were only a majority because Sandra Day O’Connell concurred. And she is off the court.

I mentioned that historically the Associated Press behaved monopolistically. In 1945 the AP was found to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. But back then, the AP was “too big to fail,” in the sense that its official mission - the economical distribution of news nationwide - was considered essential, and impossible without a wire service. But in technology terms, 1945 was in the Dark Ages - the advent of the Internet as we know it is based on lasers, fiber optics, microwaves, and satellites which were scarcely more clearly clearly envisioned in 1945 than the telegraph and the Morse Code was in 1791 when the First Amendment was ratified. The upshot of that technology is that the cost of worldwide transmission bandwidth is now so low that, I dare say, the typical internet user can afford as much bandwidth in his Internet access as the mighty Associated Press could command as recently as a century ago.

The bottom line is that wire services are not essential because their cost-efficiency rationale is now utterly obsolete. And the wire services - any and all of them, and especially the AP - give the nation a single journalism which is free but not independent. They deprive the nation of free and independent presses.


9 posted on 10/07/2014 2:39:39 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion ("Liberalism” is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)
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To: pickrell
As I noted, "the wire services - any and all of them, and especially the AP - give the nation a single journalism which is free but not independent.” The AP itself is free - but the Democratic Party does not choose to be independent of the AP.

The political principle of journalism as such - as implied in its role as critic of doers - is socialism. The political principle of the Democratic Party is power. Journalism provides the propaganda wind, and the Democratic Party sails with that wind. Journalists and Democrats go along and get along.

At its best the Republican Party is a little more principled - but lately, not so much. :-(

11 posted on 10/07/2014 3:13:36 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion ("Liberalism” is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion

Well thought out, well written.


12 posted on 10/07/2014 3:37:36 PM PDT by pickrell (Old dog, new trick...sort of)
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